WRITERS ON the Thousand and One Nights unfortunately tend to forget that the frame story, which drew official belletristic disparagement, gives its soul and meaning to the whole as much as the whole accumulates and grows in response to the frame. Each partakes of the other and lends itself to the other. Even the historical or pseudohistorical stories within the collection tend to do so, as long as storytellers create and appropriate whatever appeals to large common audiences. This effort should be seen as basic to the growth of narrative theorizations, negative and positive alike. Vituperative criticism, as well as the restrictions of market inspectors and traditionalists, convey both the fear of the tendency to compile and popularize such a repertoire and the sense of a dying court order giving way to new powers that the state apparatus copes with through systems of discipline and punishment. This vituperative criticism mounted its critique against a literary tendency whose dynamics of growth corresponded to the rise and fall of the Muslim empire of the ninth through twelfth centuries.
Litterateurs would have been aware both of this criticism as reproduced and made available through ʿAmr ibn Baḥr al-Jāḥiẓ’s (d. 869 C.E.) writings and books and of the mounting suspicion of the conservative jurists who found in litterateurs competitors and upholders of some nonreligious leanings and views. Abū al-Ḥasan Muḥammad ibn Yūsuf al-ʿĀmirī (d. 992) writes: “Some of the pious ascetics may find fault with the arts, ādāb, and charge litterateurs to be either seeking praise for eloquence and clarity, or people who are after knowledge as veneer, a means to attain success and rank through the appeal to the mighty and the noble.”1 Abū al-Ḥasan al-ʿĀmirī’s work falls within a growing corpus of cultural production that deals with information ( ʾIʿlām) with a purpose to acquaint and inform the public. The tendency is important, as it conveys recognition of responsibility and accountability to this reading public. On the other hand, ʿAmr ibn Baḥr al-Jāḥiẓ must stay with us as a source for anecdotes or tales because he has them in contexts of difference, competition, and polarity, the very aspects of urban life that are not in keeping with the spirit of cordiality, cooperation, and solidarity as enshrined in the faith. No matter how we look on al-Jāḥiẓ’s tales, they contain the combination of character sketches and narrative that makes up an art. Each miser justifies a predilection and a career in a counterlogic that builds on the real and establishes an urban narrative. It was not quite coincidental that al-Jāhiz, who was wholeheartedly involved in argumentation, the study of rhetoric, and the practice of classical clarity and balance, was also behind the growth of a realistic urban strain in narrative. In other words, the growing narrative phenomenon was gradually dislodging other competing genres while establishing for itself a theoretical ground on the basis of urgency and need.2 Of no less significance is Abū Muḥammad ibn Qutaybah’s (d. 889 C.E.) analogy for the new. In ‘Uyūn al-akhbār (Springs of information; figuratively, “the best anecdotes”), he uses the feast analogy to describe his book, an analogy that later compilers and raconteurs would use:3 “This book is like a feast with different dishes according to the tastes and likings of its attendants.”4 As such, “it is not meant to be solely for the seeker of this world, nor the seeker for the next, nor for the privileged class to the exclusion of the common, nor for royalty as opposed to the rabble.” The cultural attention to multiplicity evident here is not ordinary, for in it is an emphasis on the parity of readers from the common stratum as well the privileged classes. The appeal here is not to the old patrons, the court or the viziers and their circles; the emerging public is the arbiter. The implications of this ninth-century compendium are worth pursuing, for its resistance to class gradation and partisan or religious affiliation brings literature to the newly emerging classes in an era of expansion and growth throughout the ʿAbbāsid era (750–945 C.E.) and, later, Buwayhid (945–1055 C.E.) and Seljūq (1055–1100 C.E.) periods. These classes demand something recreational and entertaining; for that matter, even a conservative critic has to accept their presence and debate generic hierarchy. In a vein that considerably varies from conservative criticism at large, especially in eighteenth-century Europe until some time in the nineteenth century, this critique decidedly approaches its audiences as “readers.” As evident in the Fihrist of al-Nadīm, readership is much larger than we may assume, and the amount of cultural production testifies to a growing public no longer limited to the privileged group we usually associate with the court and its style of patronage. In other words, the writer has readers in mind, and his work is meant as a text to be read, enjoyed, and discussed widely. The compilers of the Thousand and One Nights were aware of these audiences, and the Islamicization of a number of tales took shape within their understanding of the needs of this public.
Theorizations of the written text are of no minor significance, despite the popularity of primary forms of storytelling and performance. At a later time, Abū Ḥayyān al-Tawḥīdī (d. 1023 C.E.), in his Al-Imtāʿ waʾl-muʾānasa (Book of enjoyment and good company), addresses his patron, Abū al-Wafāʾ, in the thirty-eighth night to underscore writing as permanence, not only to aggrandize the art—and for that matter the artist—but also to demonstrate the scholarly or artistic elaboration and meticulousness that comes with writing.5 The emergence of the book form and its subsequent popularity was demonstrated both in the recurrence of the word kitāb in almost every title after the collection of the Qurʾān and the Prophet’s traditions and in relevant celebratory literature. The caliph al-Maʾmūn was reported to be so impressed by the intellectual power of a Persian book that he asserted in consequence: “By God, this is the worthwhile discourse, not what our tongues fill our mouths with.”6 Writing and the written text were no less valued for displacing hearsay and rumors, especially as directed against the marginalized. Abū Ḥayyān al-Tawḥīdī reported to the vizier Abū ʿAbdallah al-ʿĀriḍ ibn Saʿdān how the Sufis whom he studied had collected their knowledge in ten thousand pages of some significance. This fact is important on a number of levels. It tells of the growing Sufi output, to be sure, but it also signifies a break with the dominant prose form, especially its epistolary component.
At the same time, there are audiences and reading publics. Some terms, such as samar and ḥikāya, may indicate performance and storytelling as well as reading, as Abū Ḥayyān al-Tawḥīdī’s Al-Imtāʿ wa ʾl-muʾānasa indicates. These anecdotes, witticisms, reports, and intellectual encounters were brought together as samars or nightly entertainments for Abū ʿAbdallah al-ʿĀriḍ ibn Saʿdān the vizier, but they were written down for the patron Abū al-Wafāʾ Muḥammad b. Yaḥyā al-Būzjānī (d. C.E. 387). The effort to address a reading public is central to the art, however, for it manifests both the damage done to the oral tradition, the form of which we can only conjecture at in the absence of recorded versions, and the desire among some of the literati to dig into the marginalized culture or to refine it through acceptable embeddings and translated framing narratives. Al-Jahshiyārī (d. 942 C.E.) might have been collecting and refining some of these as the Thousand and One Nights,7 a project he could not finish. Writers and compilers of narrative were on the alert lest popular anecdotes be damaged by meticulous grammar and pronunciation.8 This effort also presents us with tips about the burgeoning narrative theory. The anecdotal quality targets reading publics and assemblies and should be seen and studied in this light. Unlike poetry, it is to be circulated among readers in an urban milieu.
Between the written text and the reading public, there is a new urban bond that should be taken into account as the most celebrated and recognized. Urbanity liberates the text by offering it a presence, but it also violates its freedom with newly imposed limits and constraints. The intersection is not an easy one, and it accommodates both bondage and release. In justifying his anecdotal method of moral assessment and balance on the basis of merits and disadvantages in Al-Maḥāsin wa al-masāwiʾ, Ibrāhīm b. Muḥammad al-Bayhaqī (during the reign of al-Muqtadir, 295–302/908–932) argues for the written text as a free enterprise that escapes authority, for “it is a treasure, one that makes no demands for obligatory alms and gives the Sultan no rights.” Yet it is “a treasure for the inheritor,” as it is “an admonition to the ancestor.” This is an ingenious association between book production and the growth of the new public, which is different from the court despite the binding autocratic allegiance to the caliph as the Commander of the Faithful. On the other hand, the art of writing or inscription, the pen, stands for both the reachable and the unavailable, “the eyewitness and the absent side, as read by every tongue anytime.”9 There is no tribalism to be addressed, nor is there a class distinction to be indulged. It is there for every reader. This is social equalization through book production. Authority slips from the hands of its former owners to be gradually placed in the hands of readers, who evidently compose a good portion of society. Even the dichotomy between the secular and the religious is urbanized, and the emerging defendants of prudish discourse are belittled and ridiculed. The Islam of that period was not what later jurists tried to depict as a close system of obligations and prohibitions; it was rather an open culture with a moral base quite accommodating to the growing literary taste. Taking the new public into consideration as the readers of such works, Muḥammad ibn Qutaybah justifies book production, especially entertaining writing, as satisfying the needs of new classes, their right to rest and enjoy themselves after a hard working day. He says: “Hereby I can invigorate the reader after tiresome hard work and arduous probity. The ear soon rejects, and the soul sours. Whenever humor is attached to the right and decent or almost so, in resemblance to its timings and needs, it is not to be disapproved or reckoned reprehensible, nor is it a grave or the lesser sin if God wills.”10 The address is evidently directed to the people who may object to this kind of cultural product, the upholders of religious or moral authority, and as such the tone is tinged with apology and justification. It does not hide its authority, however, as coming from somebody who knows what is right and what is wrong. On the other hand, the whole address is pragmatic and speaks for an urban class, mercantile and professional in the main, as the emphasis on hard work and arduous labor indicates. But does this address indicate some radical change in literary and cultural standards? It does, but only if we understand it in context, for literary standards were not deeply involved in religious tenets and applications. Even the Qurʾānic verse against specific poetry and poets did not receive unusual attention. In view of the mounting opposition among some circles to free and rational schools of thought, there is in this discourse an effort to pacify hardliners and justify a new writing. Compared to the emphasis on style and quality of writing as shown at a later stage in al-Nadīm’s description of the Thousand and One Nights as “insipid” and “loathsome,” this critique emanates from the writer’s grounding in moral and religious discourse. While upholding decency and authenticity, ibn Qutaybah argues also for resemblance as a realistic tenet. This appeal to the real draws the discourse to the emerging urban classes. It is reinforced by further castigation of pseudojurists, who were on the increase at that time, as representatives of prudishness.11 Not many scholars, even from among the conservatives, were happy with this increase. He argues therefore for openness against restraint and outspokenness versus prudery. With specific reference to the mention of bodily and physical practices, he calls for openness in reference to body parts, for “there is nothing reprehensible in naming the body, for what is sinful is to slander morals, to lie and to defame people.”
This discourse should be looked at in view of the figurative meaning of the title of Abū Muḥammad ibn Qutaybah’s book Uyūn al-akhbār (that is, “the best anecdotes”). The author makes recourse to an authoritative chain of transmission, but he often puts this aside, relying on undefined authority, a practice he follows in his other books, too. This mixed position regarding antecedent authority is in keeping with contemporary attitudes that were not keen on sustaining successive transmission. Even in the instance of his often-cited reference to the qaṣīda structure, he quotes “some literary folk.”12 His akhbār or anecdotes may not be the most skillful ones, but they may well lead us to view the whole khabar practice as the most embryonic in Arabic literary tradition. Vague, undefined, or hedging reference helps in undermining and liquidating authoritative transmission, with its imposed limitations on fiction. ʿAmr ibn Baḥr al-Jāḥiẓ specifies the meaning of the khabar practice by this saying: “Some thoughtful [wise] person said to his son: son, a human is a ḥadīth, discourse [a subject of narrative], if you can be a good one, be it.” He further adds: “Every secret on earth is an anecdote about a human, or hidden from a person.”13 The association between akhbār, secrecy, suppression, expression, human life, and narrative is of great significance to any study of Arabic narrative, both because of the emphasis on the dynamics of disequilibria as central to the art and because narrative is centered on human life, especially in times of social change and political turmoil. Even translations from other literatures, as well as philosophical narratives such as ibn Ṭufayl’s (d. 1185 C.E.) Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān, cater to the needs of this changing society. Allegorical narratives and fables became an integral part of a culture that was undergoing theological, political, and social conflict. Central to this association between human endeavor and narrative are curiosity, secrecy, and desire, all of which lie behind motivational narrativity.
Yet there are a number of issues to consider in this context. Among these is the use of the past by traditionalists and polemicists such as al-Aṣmaʿī (d. 213/828) to recapture its entertaining and edifying aspect. On the other hand, there is a commitment to record the anecdotal mixed with popular lore, as the qāḍī Abū ʿAlī ʾl-Tanūkhī (d. 384/995) would do later. No matter how traditionalist was the former, he might well be prevented from using a phrase considered inappropriate in the caliph’s court. On the other hand, the need for anecdotal pleasantries was so great that he found these no less rewarding than solid knowledge: “Through knowledge, I have received gifts, and through pleasantries, I have acquired riches.”14 Al-Aṣmaʿī appealed to the court and enjoyed privileges at the risk of being shut up by its chamberlains or viziers. That was not the case with later storytellers and narrators who were ready to take to the street and marketplace to sell their pleasantries to the public. The scene would become large enough to accommodate narrative at large as an oral performance and written commitment. Diversity of tastes, as well as the demands of the caliphal court and the residences of notables and courtiers, entailed both diversity in production and a narrative corpus, accompanied by concomitant theory. Although less sophisticated than theorizations for epistolary writing, narratology grows as sets of applications and justifications that take Islam as a cultural climate and take probability and verisimilitude as yardsticks whenever applicable to nonallegorical or natural writings.
The terms that emerged before the twelfth century deserve some attention as long as they relate to this foundational theorization. Terms such as qaṣṣ were already in use to indicate, along with the act of telling, both the clipping and trimming of the hair and the tracking and interpreting the marks on the ground, a dual usage that appeared quite late in Abū Isḥāq Ibrāhīm b. ʿAlī B. Tamīm al-Ḥuṣrī al-Qayrawānī’s (d. 413/1022) Jamʿ al-jawāhir. The term assumed these meanings along with the ensuing meaning of narrative, to tell, or narrate. “Naḥnu naquṣṣu ‘alaika aḥsana ʿl-qaṣaṣi” (we narrate to you the best of stories), says the Qurʾān in the Joseph chapter, and “Yā bunayya lā-taqṣuṣ ruʾ yāka ʿalā ʾikhwatik” (Son: do not narrate your dream to your brothers). This application, not the function of the qāṣṣ, would have been in use for some time in the pre-Islamic era, and the variations on the root or further semantic nuances are in keeping with the emphasis on excellence and improvisation. Even later use of the term quṣṣāṣ, as doers or actors, the people who relate and narrate, fluctuates in relation to this Qurʾānic use. The term holds positive meaning as long as there is edification and equation between the artist and the art, its beauty and edification, for “aḥsana al-qaṣaṣi” involves both excellence and worthiness. In many instances, the term applies to the preacher, and the use of narrative for edification was viewed as a viable teaching means to reach people: “How useful they are to the common people even if what they relate is untrue,” says ibn al-Jawzī (d. 597/1200). The statement must be taken seriously as indicative of a large common public that forced the jurists to think of targeting it through storytelling. Instead of the emphasis on the erudite scholar, the humanist of the Islamic civilization, there was around ibn al-Jawzī’s time a different focus on preachers and storytellers, whose influence with the public was well recognized. Ibn al-Jawzī’s justification is clear, for they are “closer to the discourse of the common people, and the common are prone to benefit from them much more than from the most knowledgeable.”15 Indeed, even a conservative such as ibn al-Jawzī was so impressed by the practice and morals of Manṣūr b. ʿAmmār that he wrote: “There was in his qaṣaṣ and speech something wonderful, as never related to people before.”16
Whenever the preacher works within these terms, there is a positive recognition, otherwise the term lapses into the pejorative. Ibn al-Jawzī quotes the Prophet’s cousin, the caliph ʿAlī, to document the two functions of the quṣṣāṣ, the positive and the reprehensible. In other words, the profession of the quṣṣāṣ already existed in early Islam, but the fear of their possible negative influence on audiences was also behind the tendency to question and interrogate them before allowing them to preach in the mosque.17 In relating an anecdote as narrated by some “dilettantes,” al-Jāḥiẓ reports how “an Iraqi governor once bought a slave singer with an enormous amount of money. Once, he asked her to sing, but the first song she sang was as follows: ‘I go to the quṣṣāṣ every evening, anticipating God’s reward in every step.’ He said to his slave: ‘Boy, take this fornicator [whore] to Abū Ḥirzah the qāṣṣ.’”18 When he asked the latter on another occasion how he found her, he was coyly told that he found in her two of the attributes of Paradise: coolness and width. Yet, when the word quṣṣāṣ applies to preachers, there is no guaranteed approval, as many quṣṣāṣ were categorically identified by ibn al-Jawzī as both reprobates and liars or pious and God-fearing.19 Even reporters of their narratives were castigated. Thus, al-Ḥārith al-Muḥāsibī (d. 857 C.E.), Abū al-Ṭālib Makkī (d. 990 C.E.), and Abu Ḥāmid al-Ṭūsī (d. 1111 C.E.) were not exempted from reproof and objection, as they “unwittingly included in their books groundless affairs and anecdotes, unknowing that they are untrue.”20
Like many jurists, ibn al-Jawzī (d. 597/1200) was not inclined to treat this subliterature candidly. Yet his serious objections to the profession should be seen as quite revealing insofar as its growth is concerned. Ibn al-Jawzī’s writings on sermonizers constitute only a portion of an output that includes anecdotes on simpletons and other marginalized groups. Yet, in Talbīs Iblīs and in his Kitāb al- quṣṣāṣ wa-al-mudhakkirīn, he provides reasons behind his hostility to the quṣṣāṣ. These fall under the following categories, and they reveal much about the complexity of theological perspectives that vacillate between utility and religious tradition: First, the practice is against tradition, normative custom, and doctrinal authority, for there is no such thing to be followed and emulated. One should rather adhere to the Sunna, as whatever has been set and established by ancient authority and, particularly, by the Prophet. Second, “the narrative, qaṣaṣ, of precursors’ records is rarely authentic” and can be so misleadingly appealing as to lead to emulation. Third, indulgence “will keep people away from the more important occupation of reading the Qurʿān, reporting the Prophet’s tradition, and becoming more versed in religion,” and there are people who think that tradition “provides what should suffice and replace whatever else that is difficult to authenticate.” Fourth, there is the foreign (that is, the alien) that comes in the form of narrative, and these quṣṣāṣ “insert in their qaṣaṣ what deform the common people’s hearts.” In the jurist’s discourse, the strange and the alien mean anything that sounds unfitting to his taste or to his understanding of propriety and ethics. Fifth, the quṣṣāṣ “never care for accuracy and rarely guard against error because of their slight knowledge and little piety.”21 The moral ground takes precedence in this critique of storytelling material and performance, and although said relatively late, the second half of the twelfth century, it coincides well with the growing conservative discourse and the emergence of hard-line Islamism in reaction to the crusades and the disintegration of the Islamic nation (umma).
Ibn al-Jawzī was not alone, as we noticed from al-Shayzarī’s ḥisbah manual. The mounting fear of the popular tradition only testifies to its gaining momentum. As noted earlier, his yardstick only indicates how powerful the role of the quṣṣāṣ was at that time. Whenever these made recourse to performance and acting, ibn al-Jawzī thinks of them as dangerous, as they can easily deceive the impressionable and the uneducated masses. Some pretentiously shiver and cry, others tear their clothes and throw themselves on the minbar, and still others beat themselves on the head and the face as if from utter loss and infatuation.22 Many tales in the Thousand and One Nights take these gestures for granted as manifestations of despair and loss. Obviously, storytellers, as actors, are prone not only to practice these gestures but also to impose them on their created characters. In such an instance, ibn al-Jawzī approvingly quotes Abū Ḥāmid al-Ṭūsī, who says: “whenever the sermonizer is a young man, nicely dressed, refined in bearing, with unruffled demeanor fit for women assemblies, with a repertoire of poetry, gestures and motions, be wary of him.”23 Jurists and male scriptors share a belief in the impressionability and vulnerability of certain audiences, especially women. Paradoxically, some also believe in the wiles of women as categorically more enticing and ensnaring. Yet it takes Abū Ḥayyān al-Tawḥīdī some time in Al-Imtāʿ waʾl-muʾānasa (Book of enjoyment and good company) to negotiate his opinions of readership and the need to approach women audiences as no less qualified than the rest, a viewpoint his patron vizier did not uphold.24
Yet the issue is more complicated than one merely involving class or political demarcations, for there was a love/hate relationship that drove storytellers to both laud and mock the life of the court and the wealthy classes. On the other hand, there was also a fear/curiosity drive that impelled the court, for instance, to search for popular narratives. Both attitudes had great bearing on the art, not only in matters of poetics and style but also in the politics of narrative. In the first instance, we may refer to both al-Jāḥiẓ and Abū Ḥayyān al-Tawḥīdī, who showed an interest in popular lore to the extent of asserting the need to duplicate witty anecdotes or other pleasantries as they are originally reported. The former argues, whenever “you hear of a witty anecdote (nādira) from among the common people . . . never resort to iʿrāb (proper vocalization), as this will damage its enjoyment, and distort its meaning.”25 Abū Ḥayyān al-Tawḥīdī says almost the same thing, for right grammar “damages the witty anecdote,” and grammatical mistakes and their like “should not be objectionable when coming from the frivolous and the simpleton.” He further quotes from another, “the pleasantry of a witty anecdote lies in its ungrammaticality, its warmth in its proportion, its sweetness in its short size, and whenever these come from a narrator who has fluency, a charming face, and a pleasant timely gesture, in the right place and meeting the exact need, then the goal is reached and the achievement is made.”26 No less so was the attitude of al-Huṣrī al-Qayrawanī, who, in Jamʿ al-jawāhir, argues for the same position, for “there is a tool for every art, and a condition for every merchandise.”27
The justification of an art as drawn in these extracts is widely at variance with what we have already noticed in objections to it on the basis of morality or refinement. To acquiesce to circumstances of storytelling as determinant of the nature of speech means the application of new rules that may need time to be widely accepted. Nevertheless, they are available to build a theory of narrative whose legitimacy derives power from reality and similitude rather than from antecedent authority or classical taste.
Along with this keen interest in popular anecdotal literature, there was a corresponding fear of the role of the populace that compilers and professional writers tried to dismiss and dispel. The mere tendency to do so is meaningful, for narrative itself cannot grow and flourish under social restriction, nor can it be solely the domain of the court and its associates. Abū Ḥayyān al-Tawḥīdī offers further examples in this regard. His patron, the vizier ibn Saʿdān, was angry at “the common people, the rabble” as they “gossip about us, dealing with our affairs, tracking our secrets, and delving into our private life. I am at loss what to do with them. On several occasions I have had the intention of severing tongues, hands, and legs and implementing harsh punishment, in the hope that such actions will put an end to this practice and enforce respect.” Here the vizier is impersonating Shahrayar’s role in the Thousand and One Nights, while Abū Ḥayyān al-Tawḥīdī fills the role of Scheherazade. He summons her art, but instead of offering a tale, he comes up with Abū Sulaymān al-Manṭiqī’s (d. 375/985) response to similar situations. Al-Tawḥīdī refers to him both for his wisdom and for his “love for the state,” and he worries about pitfalls and failures. Thus when he says “The King cannot be without his subjects, as much as these cannot be without a king,” his words are accepted. Abū Sulaymān refers to a similar situation, when in the reign of the caliph al-Muʿtaḍid, the caliph asked his vizier how to handle a certain Shaykh al-Tabbān, whose assembly was attended by many people who interfered in the affairs of the state and kept gossiping about many unwelcome issues. The vizier suggested punishments ranging from death by fire to drowning. The caliph looked at him in surprise and asked him to show mercy and care for the people by offering them good advice and compassion, since they were ignorant and helpless.28
The significance of the anecdote and then the session with the patron lies in its urban concerns, including state affairs. The scene reveals a state well aware of the social problems that unfold in urban life. Statecraft has to develop a mechanism to meet and solve these problems. On the other hand, the anecdote conveys a scene in which the public has begun to make itself felt in various assemblies and gatherings that may seem reminiscent of bourgeois salons, clubs, and other meeting places, along with press conferences and their like, where the public acts as a counterweight to absolute authority. In this extract, the ruler or the caliph is the moderate; it is the vizier who tries to wield power against the threatening public. We should remember that high administrators and court officials were quite often responsible for the separation between the ruler and the public, as a means to legitimize their use of power. Narrative makes use of these issues; the very assemblies that bother the viziers are narratives in performance. Whereas each vizier suggests repressive measures, intellectuals and writers defuse anger through art. Indeed, intellectuals were able to separate themselves from the court and align themselves, albeit cautiously, with the public. The Scheherazade trope should be seen as appropriately fitting. Abū Ḥayyān al-Tawḥīdī was aware of this public, and his reasoning through narrative is only representative of an age that had already witnessed the diminishing power of the administration as the source of legitimacy. In cultural terms, and taking into account the basic difference between European societies of the eighteenth century and late medieval Arab societies, a difference based on the Islamicized understanding of the society as egalitarian at least in theory, we can borrow from Habermas his critique of a similar case.29 When the modern state apparatus separated itself from the monarch’s sphere, it gradually became its “counterweight.” In the case of Arab societies, intellectuals who still searched for patronage among viziers and the remnants of courts felt the urge to stand up for the growing public sphere. While objecting to the vizier’s anger at the public, Abū Ḥayyān al-Tawḥīdī was ready at a certain point in his life to write vituperatively of other viziers. Thus the Scheherazade motif should not be decontextualized, for no matter what the nature of the production and accumulation, writers and artists obviously shared a moral and intellectual responsibility. Narrative, rather than poetry, became a means toward pacification, edification, and containment. The need for the art was obviously as real as the motivations behind its collection and compilation in book form.
Al-Qāḍī Abū ‘Al’ l-Tanūkhī (d. 384/994) leads his readers toward more urban motivations. He wrote a number of books and compilations; among them is the famous Kitāb nishwār al muḥāḍara wa-akhbār al-mudhākara bi-alfāẓ al-mukhālafa (Book of shared conversation and memorable information by means of contrasted expressions; English translation: Table-talk of a Mesopotamian Judge). A number of factors were involved in his effort to compile and collect these narratives in the tenth century. He had already noticed neglect in the recording of information, anecdotes, and narratives at large. The reasons were twofold: the court was immersed in physical pleasures, whereas the common people were focused on survival. Rulers and their associates pursued their corporeal desires, but everyone else was busy with daily concerns.30 The implications are not limited to this societal complexity, for the effect on culture was serious enough to turn Baghdad into a city of desolation and loss. Returning to it in the last decades of the tenth century, “I found its assemblies no longer thriving with discussions and argumentations.”31 Furthermore, the anecdotal repertoire was in danger, for “whatever I had stored in memory began to dwindle and fade, and the meaning and theme of material orally narrated by people suffered distortion, to the extent that those who reported what we had already heard began to put into it things that defiled and distorted it.”32 To conquer time through documentation and collect narrative art as a personal enterprise went hand in hand, for the written and recorded would survive time and pass safely to the next generation, as would the name of the collector and the compiler. Storytellers and narrators felt empowered by this demand on their art to compete with poets. If epistolographers were now in demand as a consequence of rising statecraft and the needs of the chancery, narrative compilers and storytellers catered to the needs of the rising classes, including the educated and learned. At this point, the qāḍī Abū ʿAlī ʾl-Tanūkhī would go so far as to argue his case as a would-be historian. This book was to address “whoever desired to read what could lead him to the morals of past times, their canons, means, customs and ways of life, to compare our condition with that of the past, and to learn how the world died and how tempers changed.”33
These were not the only factors behind the effort. Al-Tanūkhī took it upon himself to be both novelist and storyteller. He was careful, however, to indicate its significance: “it is useful to whoever has done with most of the sciences.” On the other hand, the material imposes on him the obligation to write it down; these anecdotes and narratives “would suffer misuse for not being written down.”34 While seemingly encumbered by a taste for the real, with its chain of transmitters, the author-compiler describes his work as based on “antecedent traditions.” On the other hand, he admits to meddling and tampering with this material, creating it anew as artifact: “I intended mixing it with other arts, of distinctive biographies and stories, telepathist and clairvoyant coincidences and dreams, strange spells and vicissitudes, the anecdotes of professionals, rulers and notables, and others of every station and sort, illuminating it with light verse, and recent prose and entertainment.”35 The actors and reporters, he notes, come from every station in life, including businessmen, beggars, knights, spies, wise people, peasants, notables, buffoons, and brigands.36 Among writers and geographers it became almost a recognizable practice not only to make use of every reporter, regardless of class and identity, but also to mix with every class and impersonate every character, as was the case with the geographer Shams al-Dīn Abū ʿAbdullah al-Muqaddasī, whose book Aḥsan al-taqāsīm fī maʿrifat al-aqālīm (available between 985–986 C.E.) is recognized as the best of its kind.37 In other words, the tenet of reliable transmitters was no longer valid, nor was the restriction on reporting and fiction.
This emphasis on diversity had become part of an attitude quite customary among geographers, travelers, and compilers of narrative. To be sure, the effort had a utilitarian motivation in that one had to accept and relate narrative on the basis of appeal. It also reveals a process of change that no longer accepted elitism as a yardstick or touchstone. On the other hand, it betrays dissatisfaction with the long-respected tradition of successive and authentic transmission. As in al-Ḥuṣrī’s Jamʿ al-jawāhir and Dhayl zahr al-ādāb, there is no longer an emphasis on authenticity and reliability. At the request of Abū ʾl-Faḍl al-ʿAbbās b. Sulaymān, secretary to the chancellery in Qayrawān, al-Ḥuṣrī sifts the material that the latter has brought with him and applauds his own selections in a book that is neatly organized and carefully embellished with nawādir (rarities and witty anecdotes), strange anecdotes and happenings, news, and almost every kind of narrative of an appealing nature. He claims to quote both the ancient and the modern, the wise and the insane, the noble and the reprobate, the generous and the misers, the learned ‘ulamā and the uneducated, the knowledgeable and the simpletons, the elite and the rabble, parasites and snobs, the gay and the castrated, boys and women.38 He is aware throughout of his readers, since he established principles for his selections in order to impose on the whole a flexible form and order. The artist, the night entertainer (musāmir), and the narrator of witty anecdotes and rarities (munādir) should be, broadly speaking, “delicately suggestive, deftly expressive, gracefully refined, eloquent, elegant, not boring or violent, adapting himself to every situation, and utilizing his abilities aptly.”39 While these are principles for the artist as narrator or entertainer to follow, the source material eludes classical strictures and relies on almost every attractive source, regardless of race, class, or gender. Narratologists as such oppose any literary canons that may obstruct the growth of this art. They are careful, however, lest the reader react with repugnance. From every source there is a choice, and the reader “should not look at the matter with resentment, putting the matter aside, whenever coming upon an insult or stupidity.”40 Now it is the reader rather than the court that is the arbiter. He or she is the patron. Indeed, King Shahrayar of the Thousand and One Nights is partly a trope for this type of readership, which searches for the pleasant and the entertaining.
Al-Ḥuṣrī al-Qayrawānī (d. 412/1022) followed al-Tanūkhī (d. 384/994) in more than one respect. Both resorted to an unrestricted use of sources, and both contributed to the dominating narrative method involving a free use of material. Class and race inhibitions almost disappeared, and the appeal to entertainment and possible benefit became a priori at a time when even the court was keen on knowing more about other cultures that included marginal groups and newly expanding classes. For the narrative art, this unrestricted use of material implied due recognition of every profession and craft. Both writers were influenced by al-jāhiẓ, who set the stage for the development of narrative art. Their reliance on both the acceptable and questionable, the canonized and deviant, should also indicate to us the tendency toward characterization and character sketching as an egalitarian art. The equation developed neatly by al-jāhiẓ between narrative art, especially in the portrayal of Khālid ibn Yazīd (otherwise Khālawayh the mukaddī, also written as mukdī, “tramp”), and theft, or between the qaṣṣ as the latter practiced it and the acquisition of money, is no fleeting matter. Although al-jāhiẓ provides us with other examples of miserly behavior, he gives voice to Khālid ibn Yazīd, who leaves a testimonial letter to his son to remind him of his many professions and qualifications and his readiness to relapse into either theft or qaṣṣ as a means of counteracting the threat of poverty. This empowering narrative is another way of satirizing class distinctions. All professions lead to wealth and social distinction. With this understanding, no source is better than any other, and what applies to money is also applicable to narrative. “If my wealth goes, I will be a qāṣṣ or a vagabond, as I was a tramp. My beard is abundant and white; my throat is voluble and robust; my demeanor is good, and people find me appealing.”41 Coming from Khālid ibn Yazīd, the man who thinks that poets and orators use their skill in order to embezzle others, this kind of discourse unsettles and undermines the tenets of classical writing, including such matters as truthfulness, reliability, and authenticity. Indeed, al-jāḥiẓ quotes another who insists that “people abuse lying and wrong it when they ignore its attributes and recall only its ills,” as they do “when applauding truthfulness by recognizing its attributes while overlooking its harms.”42 In the context of such utilitarianism and expediency, the moral base loses. In relation to the burgeoning theory of narrative, this ambivalence is in keeping with the free use of source material and the unrestricted view of professions and social status. Narrative as such evolves both as a classless mode of writing and as one with no moral obligations of the kind demanded by jurists. What Khālid ibn Yazīd said and left behind, whether real or fictitious, found its way to such compendiums as al-jāḥiẓ’s Book of Misers.
Narrative is no less implicating for being so free. One way of avoiding reports of an insulting nature is to make passing reference to an anecdote, specifying its source, and then abruptly adding that there is a lot in this vein that may be resented. In other words, the compiler turns into a narrator while simultaneously inviting the reader to search for yet more demeaning and insulting material. As if not satisfied with this strategy, the compiler-narrator, for example Abū Isḥāq Ibrāhīm b. ʿAlī b. Tamīm al-Huṣrī al-Qayrawānī, will go so far as to implicate both narrator and reader in a bond that anticipates reader-response theorists. He adds: “It is said: the narrator is one of the slanderers, and the reader one of the speakers.”43 Establishing this bond between the two, the writer consolidates a narrative theory that eludes social and political strictures but forcefully strives to associate narrative with book production.
To prepare space for this mode of writing, theorists tried to situate the genre within a historical understanding of evolution and change. In Al-Imtāʿ wa ’l-muʾānasa(Book of enjoyment and good company), Abū Ḥayyān al-Tawḥīdī argues for evolution as a historical given, “for in every hundred years people acquire a new normative custom.”44 Although he was advancing this idea in order to justify a deviation from his master, al-jāḥiẓ, and his method, the whole context of the discussion can be seen as a revisionist reading of tradition. Rather than accepting antecedent authority as a given, as the source of legitimacy and literary or cultural standards, the argument considers time as the determining element of change. There are no timeless standards or applications. Imitation is ruled out, and innovation and fashion are the new criteria for evaluating works and literary products. Need, requirement, and time: these are the new considerations. With these new provisions the Islamic context works well, since it undergoes change like any other milieu; for that matter, conservative jurisprudence was expected to cope with these requirements and not abide by the Sunna as a posture of dormancy and fixity. Preceding Abū Ḥayyān al-Tawḥīdī, al-Tanūkhī had already debated such a position and the claims of subordination to other standards and genres, for the art that al-Tanūkhī was advancing in a number of compilations is “unprecedented and unique, and it is an original genre of its own” (lā naẓīra lahū wa-lā shakl, wa-huwa waḥdahu jinsun aṣlun).45 The emphasis on both uniqueness and originality is a romantic claim, to be sure, but its legitimacy acquires its power from faith in newness, not imitation. Tradition is laid aside, and the writer is left on his or her own, to devise the right method for the material at hand.
However, the art described by al-Tanūkhī is more of a narrative amalgam, a practice that we can trace in other compilations and works but that is also different from a number of other narrative practices. To have a better view of these narrative practices and accompanying theoretical explications, they can be categorized as follows:
First, narrative compilation as proposed by al-Tanūkhī and Abū Isḥāq Ibrāhīm b. ʿAlī b. Tamīm al-Huṣrī al-Qayrawānī, not only as collections of anecdotes and reports, embellished with proverbs, exemplary sayings, and poetic gleanings from ancient and contemporary sources, but also as a method of creating material anew through careful trimming, designing, appropriating, improvising, and shaping.
Second, narrative as originated by al-jāḥiẓ, where characters, uniquely presented as misers, for instance, justify their understanding of wealth and money as an accumulation that should resist attempts at deceit, extravagance, embezzlement, and misuse. While framing these narratives with the serene yet cynical voice of the author, each miser is given enough space to argue and justify an attitude that may sound inappropriate and even less miserly for fellow misers (as is the case in the portrayal of Abū Saʿīd al-Madāʾinī). The whole narrative of al-Madāʾinī is a masterpiece, both as a social tract in a vastly expanding urban milieu with enough identifications and significations to allow shared codes and as a narrative that resorts to argumentation through dialogic principles of great variety.46
Third, narrative as nights. While we have been deprived of al-Jahshiyārī’s 480 nights as recorded by the bibliophile Abū al-Faraj Muḥammad ibn Abī Yaʿqūb Isḥāq al-Warrāq al-Baghdādī al-Nadīm (d. 385/995), the practice of offering asmār, or nightly entertainments, in a Scheherazade-like fashion was popular enough to be used by Abū Ḥayyān al-Tawḥīdī in Al-Imtāʿ wa ʾ l-muʾānasa (Book of enjoyment and good company), whereby thirty-seven nights are addressed to the vizier. The practice here, however, follows al-jāḥiẓ in negotiating a method that carves a path carefully and cautiously through prohibitions, censorship, interests, and preferences. Almost every address needs to justify its presence between seriousness and flippancy, solemnity and laughter, silliness and magnificence, argumentation and narrativity. Yet the writer is unlike the master in many things that he justifies in terms of evolution, change, and perspective, in what can be seen as an anxiety of influence. Of some significance in this respect is Abū Ḥayyān al-Tawḥīdī’s recourse to questions and answers instead of argumentation or ḥijāj, the master’s renowned method.
Fourth, narrative as a one-day biographical story of a personal record, a slice of life, which represents the focus of some maqāmāt without being restricted to one topic or specific size, like al-Azdīʾs Ḥikāyat Abūʾl-Qāsim al-Baghdādī. Although using ḥikāya in reference to the vagrant hero, Abū al-Qāsim al-Baghdādī, the author does not intend to emulate his predecessors and contemporaries by either conjoining imitation and discourse or delivering a mere tale as narrative. The author’s third-person narrative is fused into the hero’s first-person perspective as he speaks of assemblies, recalls occasions, reels off jokes, pokes fun at society, exposes double standards and hypocrisy, inserts solemn extracts from current literature, acquaints us with problems of life both inside and outside Baghdad, cites joyful and pleasurable gatherings, and refers to singers and responses to renowned slave singers and gay boon-companions. While this book-length narrative is unique, Ṭāhā al-Ḥājirī compares it to another one, in four volumes, by Abū ʿAlī al-Hatimī (d. 388/998).47 Surprisingly, two nights in Abū Ḥayyān al-Tawḥīdī’s Al-Imtāʿ wa ʾl-muʾānasa (28–29) appear verbatim in al-Azdī’s Ḥikāyat Abū ʾl-Qāsim, as I have noted elsewhere.48
Fifth, popular tales, whether in translation, appropriation, adaptation, or subsequent framing in collections, as in the case of the Thousand and One Nights, that were to grow as such between the ninth and fourteenth centuries.
Sixth, philosophical narrative, visionary revelations, and allegorical and animal stories. Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ’; and Sahl ibn Hārūn are merely two among many in this regard as recorded in al-Nadīm’s Fihrist. Among long narratives, ibn Ṭufayl’s Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān stands foremost. Similar is the allegorical narrative Al-Asad waʾl-ghawwāṣ (The Lion and the Fox), written around A.H. 530.
More significant to the present discussion is the effort to theorize for each category of narrative. In Ḥikāyat Abūʾl-Qāsim al-Baghdādī, al-Azdī offers us an interesting reading of the flourishing narrative tradition. He argues for the narrative art as being close to life, a slice of life. The author prefers to call it nādira, a rare witty anecdote, yet the story actually follows the career of a vagrant who is described as a colorful figure from the fringes of society, someone who has been in the company of every thug, ruffian, and parasite but who has managed to acquire the ways of refined literati. In other words, he is the very crystallization of every aspect of society and every character, the epitome of sprawling Baghdad’s positive and negative shades and colors. This record of one-day happenings (in which he is the actor, speaker, and narrator) emerges as a series of responses to questions and requests from the audience.49 As such, the language is not unified. The significance of this one-day tale of real happenings, albeit of very dubious nature, lies in a dialogic space that accommodates a number of languages from every social and professional group.
Perhaps closer to the genre of the maqāma than any other narrative practice, especially in terms of the main hero as vagrant and the engagement in real situations among every social and professional class, Ḥikāyat Abūʾl-Qāsim al-Baghdādī sets the stage for the picaresque novel. However, the vagrant’s attendance at assemblies, as well as his openness to questions and requests, is not as smoothly handled as may first appear. The audience may request: “Abū ʾl-Qāsim, if you would only be kind enough to tell us more of these tales to complement the uns (pleasurable company) brought us by your Hadīths,” but his response is, “No sir, search for some one else to make fun of.”50 In other words, he does not follow a Scheherazade-like formula by either appeasing or delaying a request. Nevertheless, he is often inclined to jump to another anecdote and engage the company with both the pleasurable and shocking. The art is therefore more realistic than normal anecdotal narratives, in that it introduces into these assemblies material and detail that may be shocking to prudish or even refined tastes.
On the other hand, the use of request and response as a device to perpetuate narrative and provoke the narrator is the other side of the author’s textual displays of allegiance to patrons. In the steps of al-Jāḥiẓ, both al-Qayrawānī and Abū Ḥayyān al-Tawḥīdī wrote and compiled these narratives and justifications for the art in response to their patrons’ requests. These efforts parallel comparable ones both in poetic dīwāns and epistolary compendiums.
Yet al-Qayrawānī’s service to the art lies not only in following the earlier practice of al-Tanūkhī or improving on this unique and unprecedented art, as the latter deemed it, but also in his deliberately interchangeable use of such terms as al-munādir waʾl-muhātir waʾl-musāmir (the narrator of witticisms, rare anecdotes, vituperative response, and night entertainments).51 His inclusion of the muhātir fits well with many of Abū ʾl-Qāsim al-Baghdādī’s interventions. The term had not been much in use in combination with the other terms as applied to the practice. To include scathing, slanderous, and vituperative materials as narrative was both a daring and intentional enterprise, in keeping with the poetic tradition. Yet he has an explanation for this inclusion, in relation to the immediate response of the audience52 and, more often, in view of language registers and metaphors. He argues that metonymy is often used as a figurative replacement for the indecent, gruesome, and obscene; there is no reason, he says, not to deal with whatever is present in life.53 In other words, a great deal of language works in this domain the moment it is freed from the metonymic.
Although not strictly written as a sequential narrative, as is the case in many of al-Tanūkhī’s narratives, Abū Isḥāq al-Qayrawānī’s Jamʾ vindicates its presence as narrative in terms of the Arabic view of ādāb. The feast analogy is significant in this respect, for proper variety is the standard. He provides us with a prologue and epilogue that summarize this method. He justifies the combinational variety as being a gradual layering and neat gradation aimed at satisfying the soul’s craving for change, for “the soul is naturally prone to alteration” and is innately restless.54 This restlessness he satisfies with different selections, and difference rather than sameness becomes his way of avoiding monotony and gaining both attraction and appeal. “A thing that matches its object loses its radiance,” he argues. Yet he also asserts the need to “include the tale with other tales, and the verse with other verses, for gathering is better than dispersion.”55 In the book’s conclusion, he is so sure that he has been following the method he set out earlier that he describes himself as the “clever musāmir and skilful munādir,” someone who is capable of producing a neat book of proportionate marvels nicely and carefully assembled.56
Throughout his work, he approaches the idea of compilation as jamʾ, a configurational site where every narrative insertion is prefaced with a theoretical explication. The uniqueness, if there is any, lies not only in the processes of selecting and joining but also in the anecdotal effort to justify theory with more gleanings from history, life, and the rich cultural repertoire of the Arab-Islamic empire. In introducing the second portion of the book, the stepping stone, the access, or the origination, he sets down the following procedures:
First: an appeal to the addressee or the audience, by moving from eloquent discourse to artful response;
Second: a shift from open witticism or rare curiosity to smooth affront;
Third: a move from unfamiliar convergence to wonderful confrontation;
Fourth: a switch from actual resemblance to enlightening example;
Fifth: the inclusion of whatever that enlivens the heart and dispels morbidity.57
In the first part of the book, the procedure functions as follows: Abū Isḥāq al-Qayrawānī specifies, for instance, that, when the narrator “is narrating a refined curiosity and charming insight, he should not deliver it grammatically and make it boring.” He also addresses length, eloquence, and appropriate delivery, following such sections with appropriate anecdotes that illustrate the principles without distracting attention.58 On the other hand, when he addresses length, he stipulates that the artist “should not elaborate and bore to death, nor should he skip and damage; there is a purpose and goal for every speech, but there is also a limit to the audience’s attention-span.” This is followed by an anecdote that accords with the systematic planning of the first part of the book, which serves as a theoretical introduction.59 Aside from the need to explain the mechanism of the art, the author also caters to utilitarian preoccupations, stressing that literature in this vein stimulates diversity, enlightens the mind, frees people from worries, and turns them into pleasant companions. In other words, even this introductory section unfolds pleasantly in order to justify and elucidate theory and practice.
Abū Isḥāq al-Qayrawānī is more faithful to a narrative tradition that opts at the outset for an authorial frame whereby the author or the compiler evolves as the narrator of narrators, the person in charge of a large repertoire, often of an anecdotal quality. Scheherazade had already been established as the model for such an anonymous author. Thus al-Qayrawānī’s claim to be the narrator of narrators is not a casual one. The author as compiler or vice versa no longer submits to an authority other than the self and its sources. Sacred and cherished ancestry almost disappears, and religion becomes a part of human knowledge, where the whole legacy of the manqūl (transmitted knowledge) and maʿqūl (implying the sciences of the Greeks, Indians, Persians, and Arabs) are brought together as a repertoire to be used and reproduced for a new market. The demands of this market require production. Hence the feast analogy, adopted from ibn Qutaybah in a similar application to the new compilation. The compiler is also an author, since to intervene in the material, as he and al-Tanūkhī admitted to doing, involves a deliberately revisionist strategy that caters to the tastes and interests of the addressee and reading public. The narrator may thus emerge as the actor whose use of others is an act of appropriation and digestion, since references or quotations are no longer the same when they are involved in a new textual terrain. The author as narrator, like al-Tawḥīdī, is the most conscious of sources. He therefore resorts to contemporaries, precursors, and unidentified material only in order to supplement a perspective or evade censorship or confrontation with the patron or audience. On the other hand, the author may pose as chronicler or archivist while imposing a unified vision on a scene or a character, as al-Jāḥiẓ does, for example, in his book on misers. The book derives its significance both from its meticulous care for a social category and from its argumentative principle that enables the reader to delve into the mind of each character and to read its own perspectives, views, and stratagems. The encapsulating vision is that of the author as narrator, one who holds every detail in hand, cynically pursuing threads of behavior and address, and yet careful in case too much exposure and revelation backfires. The novelist-narrator sets the tone for a realistic narrative that expands profusely in keeping with urban life but that also adopts religion to new needs and interests without serious transgressions of basic rituals and obligations.
Looked upon in context, Arab writers of fiction and realistic narratives have worked out a preliminary theoretical framework of a cultural nature that has been cursorily noticed, not because of its dearth or insignificance but mainly because of the complexity of this transgeneric writing, its amalgamated nature, and its consequent challenge to available theories and yardsticks. The case is even more so because the literature of the Arabs has been steadily viewed as primarily poetic. Metonymic scriptoria and narrative at large suffers in comparison, and if it draws attention it is only to document a tradition or to substantiate a position. On the other hand, Muḥammad ibn Qutaybah’s (d. 889 C.E.) feast analogy to describe his book ‘Uyūn al-akhbār only sums up this kind of narratology, for in variety, resemblance, and liveliness of detail and characters, it substantiates and deepens urban narrative as developed and promoted earlier by al-Jāḥiẓ. The feast analogy is important for another reason, however, for it too signifies the nonverbal, and hence its recurrence as analogy should alert us to theoretical appropriations of whatever participates in setting the right equation between narrative and life. There is also a third reason for the significance of this analogy, especially in relation to the next and concluding chapter on nonverbal artifice and narrative. The word ādāb has other connotations, and litterateurs of the classical period were not oblivious to the intricacies of the word, its root, and use, in relation to acquired knowledge and the systematic attention to good manners. They were aware of the close connection between the word and the feast, where a number of people gather around a banquet. The book’s collection of narratives is no less inviting than a meaty repast. There is discussion, intimacy, and solidarity involved in the feast; there is also generosity and hospitality. Reading may be a solitary endeavor, but not the feast as a meaty repast, or ma’dubah. Yet both operate on the human agent. The person will never be the same thereafter. On the other hand, this feast analogy occurs in a number of contexts that belie the premise that silence is equilibrium. Silence operates in many tales as an instigator of other nonverbal actors who take over the stage and reverse the divine order. In an amazing instance in the second qalandar’s tale, the qalandar is told in a dream that he will have a series of adventures, which he will navigate in safety on the condition that he does not mention God. The condition seems to defy Muslim culture and faith, as the mention of God is quite recurrent and a distinctive marker in any sociable discourse: greeting, feasting, even exercising. To set such a condition may have been meant as an exercise in restraint. Al-Jāḥiẓ tells us of one slave girl who was reportedly so eloquent and dexterous that she could recite ten thousand lines where there is “not one mention of God, or of reward and punishment in the Hereafter.”60 Repression of the most recurrent element in an Islamic discourse functions as narrative with expected recognition and reward. Against Bakhtin’s premise, we may say that repression is in parity with loquacity. The fear of God resides in the background, and people try to demonstrate their tact and acumen through human means. The manifestations of this repression are many, however, and along with some other means of nonverbal participation or action, they function as dynamic narrative tools and components in the world of the Thousand and One Nights.
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